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Victory!

* Anatole Kaletsky: Associate Editor of The Times* Professor Norman Stone: Professor of International Relations and Director of the Russian Centre at Bilkent University, Ankara.* Alexei Pushkov: Anchor of the most popular Russian TV programme “Post Scriptum” which has considerable influence on Russian public perception of international events.

Speakers against the motion:

* Edward Lucas: Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the The Economist and author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West (2008).

Sunday, November 20, 2005

It's easy to caricature Poland as a country of dim, superstitious peasants. Iremember CNN's Ted Turner doing his unfunny impression of a "Polishmine-detector"- putting his hands to his ears and hopping clumsily. A PolishDeputy Foreign Minister, Radek Sikorski, forced him to apologise.

émigré who has now become Poland's new defence minister and is making wavesagain. He has declassified his country's Warsaw Pact files, handing them over tothe national archives. But the international reaction to this reflects anothercaricature of Poland, no less offensive, and much more dangerous.There were plenty of snide remarks about Sikorski's move, but the FinancialTimes will serve as an example. It wrote that Poland "risked inflaming tensionswith Russia" and was "prepared to incur Moscow's wrath". Leaving aside the mixedmetaphor (a tendon can be inflamed, but not a tension) this seems a perversespin on the affair.Russia has made no public protest about the opening of the archives. Nor,according to Sikorski, has it complained privately. So Western opinion isannoyed not because Poland is picking a fight with Russia, but because it isdoing something that might just possibly at some point annoy the Kremlin - withthe subtext that this would always be the wrong thing to do.That's a strange way of looking at things and one that is increasingly prevalentin Western capitals. Poland and the Baltic states are seen as faraway placeswith incomprehensible habits, values and grudges, bent on disrupting theimportant business of getting lots of cheap oil and gas from that nice Mr Putin.If Russia hadn't thought about complaining about the declassification before, itcertainly has every opportunity to do so now.It doesn't really matter what is in the archives; Soviet plans for nuclear war,plus the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia will probably be the most interesting.Other countries - such as the former East Germany - have already declassifiedtheir bits of the files.The point is that the new Polish government is serious about wanting to clean upthe remains of the country's Communist past. It is doing so promptly, to adeafening lack of applause in the West. I find that baffling. Imagine if aformer Nazi-occupied country - France for example - still had a large pro-Naziparty that had managed to block the release of the Wehrmacht's wartime archivesthere. How cross everyone would be about it, and how glad if a stronglyanti-Nazi party came to power pledging to open the German military files (andthe Gestapo ones too, for that matter). That, roughly, is what has happened inPoland.The real reason why bien-pensant Western opinion-formers hate this sort of thingis that it sabotages the cosy, sloppy, moral equivalence that marked theirthinking during the Cold War years. If you are confronted with incontrovertibleevidence that the Soviet Union was both a monstrous dictatorship and anaggressive imperialist power, it becomes much harder to maintain that "the USAand the USSR were as bad as each other".The fact is that if it wasn't for America, Western Europe would have had a hardjob withstanding Soviet belligerence. Patriots like Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski -NATO's top spy in Communist-ruled Poland - knew that, which is why for a decadethey risked torture and death to work secretly for the West. But that part ofhistory is something that many people whose freedom he helped preserve wouldmuch rather forget, if they ever knew it in the first place.# Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Reading the latest annual survey from the European Bank forReconstruction and Development (EBRD) of the progress of theex-captive nations in economics and institution-building, I wonderedabout an ideal world where the engineers are Czechs, the chefsHungarian, the soldiers Polish, the bureaucrats Estonian and themusicians Russian. And in a nightmare world, the bureaucrats areRussian, the soldiers Czechs, the chefs Estonian and so on. Such jokesare a good way to make friends - and lose them. No country likes todwell on its weak points (and I should say quickly, before my inboxstarts bursting with protests, that I have had many delicious meals inTallinn, know some very brave Czechs and highly efficient Russians).

But behind the more-or-less amusing stereotypes is a serious pointabout the right way to look at the post-Communist world. There are twotraps. One is defeatism, the other arrogance. The best example of thelatter came in the 1990s, when Russia was the unfortunate beneficiaryof a great deal of enthusiastic and intrusive Western advice andscrutiny. Locals and others complained with some justice that it waswrong to expect the country to meet Swiss standards of administrativeefficiency, German altruism in foreign policy, American workaholismand Dutch openness to foreign trade. It would be fairer to expect, atleast at first, Italian standards of public-sector efficiency, Frenchpolitical maturity, German flexibility and Swiss cultural openness.Such critics had a point. It was ludicrous, for example, to expect ahuge country emerging from decades of totalitarianism and isolation todevelop in the space of a few years the financial system of anadvanced capitalist country. The attempt to do so meant that hot moneysloshed round weak crooked institutions, leading to an inevitablefinancial bubble that cost millions of Russians their savings in 1998.

But it is wrong for two reasons to take the opposite view and say thatpost-communist countries are doing very well if they meet the worststandards of old Europe.

The first is that the collapse of Communism did give the chance of afresh start. In countries like France and Italy, many people stillsincerely believe that the system of past decades can work, with a bitof judicious tweaking. It was very hard, almost impossible, to believethat about Communism in 1989. Different countries approached thatfresh start in different ways and with different starting points, butit was there. Good policies paid off; bad ones brought a high price inlost time, wealth, jobs and happiness. Hungary got it right withprivatisation for example; the Czech Republic got it wrong. Slovakiawasted time under the dreadful Vladimir Meciar. Ukraine dithered,while Russia at least tried to privatise and liberalise.

Second, post-Communist countries don't have the luxury of hangingabout. Italy can still just about afford its comic-opera politics, forthe same reason that it can afford grand opera at La Scala: becauseit's a big rich country. Ukraine, if it wants to catch up thiscentury, can't.

What I'd really like from the EBRD is a detailed comparison thatincludes old Europe as well as new. It's good to see that in somerespects ex-Communist countries' business environments are nearingthose in Germany - a country the report uses as a benchmark. But itwould be even more interesting to see further comparisons. How doesHungary stack up against Austria? Or Estonia against Finland? Thatwould spur the ex-captive nations to greater efforts - and perhaps onsome fronts be a salutary shock to the richer countries' comfortablecomplacency.

Monday, November 14, 2005

Some of the tools are rusty; others are just plain useless. The skillsI struggled to acquire in communist-era Eastern Europe now seem asquaint as the ability to hunt a woolly mammoth or sharpen a flint axe.

Or do they? My biggest stumbling blocks: visas, communications andstaying fed, have all but vanished. Bluffing and subterfuge wereessential to get inside places like Ceausescu's Romania, CommunistCzechoslovakia, or the Soviet Union, and to work once there. Not anymore. I no longer envy colleagues for being dab hands at the telex(remember that?), or for their wiles in getting planned-economyrestaurants to provide food.Thankfully, it is no longer necessary to know the ins and outs ofMarxist theory, The ability to swap Lenin quotes with Communistapparatchiks counts for nothing. Languages matter less too: inpre-revolutionary Eastern Europe, you simply had to stumble throughyour irregular verbs, suffixes and declensions. The alternative was totalk only to a tiny bunch of polyglots; or else rely on a small poolof imperfect interpreters who were easy targets for secret policepressure.Most importantly, there's no risk to life and liberty. Nobody beatsyou up. I no longer feel overwhelmed by the moral courage of myinterviewees. Even the most unpleasant post-Communist politician isunlikely to be as revolting a liar and bully as, say, a Soviet-erasecret policeman.But some things have stayed the same. Despite a decade in thelimelight, plus EU and NATO membership for the lucky ones, much of theregion is once again below the Western editorial horizon. I rememberbeseeching my bosses (I wasn't at The Economist then, I should add) inthe late 1980s to take Yugoslavia seriously.Now the frozen conflicts of the Caucasus and Western Balkans are againtoo complicated and faraway for Western public attention to focus on.And ignorance is still amazing. Last week BBC World reported,straight-faced: "Poland is struggling to catch up its richerneighbours, Germany and [sic] Russia."More importantly, history is still the key. Understanding Polishpolitics is impossible without knowing the difference between theLondon and Lublin governments, or the difference between Pilsudski'sand Dmowski's concept of nationhood. Russia is stuck in the clovenpine of its history. In every country in the region, the simplest butmost revealing question is still: "What were you doing before 1989?And what did your parents do?".That touches the biggest similarity: Communism may be dead as anideology, but its psychological legacy lives on. Below a thin layer ofpost-Communist polish, anyone with a background in the old regime islikely to have a different emotional, social and moral wavelength:more hierarchical, more suspicious, more verbose, more rigid (andperhaps less principled) than the naive outsider might expect.Cutting through that still requires sharp thinking. As Raymond Smithexplains in his classic work on the communist mindset, Negotiatingwith the Soviets, the trick is to decide quickly whether to befriend,bully or beg. A haughty approach (done with conviction) gets youalmost everywhere: kow-towing to higher authority is deeply ingrained.If you can stomach it, getting friendly may work too - though you mayhave to do a favour in return: personal connections were, after all,the fuel that kept planned economies functioning. If all else fails,grovel: humiliation is cheap if it gets you what you want.It varies, of course. Belarus, Transdniestr and the like are theworst. They just happen to be where I find my flint axe quite useful too.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

I first came across them in the 'Infobiuras' of the Lithuanianpro-independence movement, Sajudis, in early 1990.

Young, bright-eyed Americans, Canadians and Australians, steeped byfervently patriotic parents in the history of countries they hardlyknew, bent on fulfilling their historical destiny. They translateddocuments into English, briefed journalists, advised politicians andgenerally brought a blast of optimistic, confident radicalism to thenervous, blurry world of collapsing Communism.Sometimes the results were more spectacular than productive. Duringone of the hairier moments of the Lithuanian independence struggle,when it seemed as though the West, with the honourable but minorexception of Iceland, was going to abandon Lithuania to the mercies ofSoviet stormtroopers, I remember hearing one beefy young Lithuanianémigré bellowing down the phone "Don't be such a f***ing jerk!" Iasked him who he'd been talking to. "The American ambassador inMoscow," he replied tersely.There were grown-ups too. The most impressive, Stasys Lozoraitis, ran,unsuccessfully, for president of Lithuania in 1993. He had spent hiswhole life as ambassador to the Vatican and United States, in quixoticservice to a country that most of the world thought had disappeared in1940. He was urbane, polyglot, amusing, and charismatic, with anItalian wife who added a rare touch of glamour and sophistication tothe drab, stodgy world of Lithuania. Elsewhere, these high-poweredémigrés included a deeply impressive Canadian-Latvian professor oflinguistics, a forceful young man who ran the Estonian section ofRadio Free Europe and an ambitious Polish refugee-journalist, whoafter studying at Oxford in the early 1980s spent time inSoviet-occupied Afghanistan with the resistance.The galaxy of talent had some black holes too. There was one adviserto a Baltic foreign ministry whose sole qualification was a diploma inbar management and a hard-drinking old bat in an economics ministrywhose previous job was as a junior public relations woman for a themepark. One of the most energetic and engaging Lithuanian émigrés turnedout to have been working for both the KGB and the Americans (in whatorder was never completely clear).But the presumption then was that even the most modest émigré talentwas badly needed. Even the most superficial knowledge of the way theWest worked was a big advantage. Knowing how to use a computer, handlephone messages, talk politely to strangers in English and organisetravel to faraway places were all rare skills.That changed quickly. But the best émigré talent is still around. TheCanadian professor, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, is now president of Latviaand one of the few East European politicians with a claim to worldstatus. The young man from Radio Free Europe, Tom Ilves, is now aleading member of the European Parliament. The Anglo-Polishjournalist, Radek Sikorski, has just been sworn in as defence minister.But the political balance has changed. Now the diaspora appearsprovincial and out of touch. In Toronto, Ealing and the Chicagosuburbs, they are still baking the old recipes, learning folk songs,sending children to Saturday school and keeping the church afloat. Butthe diaspora is no longer the political lungs of nationhood: thesource of free ideas and discussion, a constant reminder that theCommunist version of the past, present and future was an evil fiction.In politics, it's the homeland that's humming.But not in economics. A million East Europeans or more have goneabroad in search of jobs and education. That raises a big question forthe ex-captive nations: can they ever attract these bright, mobilepeople back home?

Saturday, November 12, 2005

Belarusaitis used to be a rare affliction. One symptom is visitingMinsk frequently, a clean and spacious city, but not distinguished byits aesthetic attraction, to put it mildly. Another is a love ofinflicting obscure details of Belarussian history on unsuspectingpeople. "Did you know that there used to be two rival Belarussiangovernments-in-exile? One dates from 1918 and the other—which has nowfolded—from 1944". As my eyes light up and start swivelling, myinterlocutors look increasingly puzzled and start edging away.

That's just embarrassing. But a more dangerous symptom is wishfulthinking about the chances for political change. I know: I was so fedup with the bureaucratic, corrupt regime of Vyacheslav Kebich that Ilonged for Alexander Lukashenka to win the presidential elections in1994. To my lasting embarrassment, I even wrote favourably about himin The Economist. A populist with a strong anti-corruption message,who genuinely engaged with people when he campaigned, seemed a welcomebreath of fresh air.

It soon became clear that things were going wrong. A couple of yearslater I interviewed the president, when Ford opened a car plantoutside Minsk (they soon had to close it). His answers were so erraticand off-the-point that it was hard to fit them into the article. Eventhe bits I could use didn't make it into print: the Economist crunchedthem into the anonymous "Some top Belarussians think this [the plant]is the start of something big". His press people, who had beenexpecting a cover-story, have never allowed me near him since.

Now I worry that other people have Belarusaitis worse than me. Acountry that used to be a black hole is now attracting a lot ofwestern interest. This chiefly manifests itself in a rich programme ofseminars and handouts for Belarussian opposition organisations. Theaim is to present a real challenge to the Lukashenka regime in theelections next year.

It's easy to see why excitement is growing. The opposition has agreedon a single candidate, the multilingual physicist AlexanderMilinkevic. When I met him a few years ago I found him not just cleverand honest, but sane and sensible—which is more than can be said formany of the chancers, scroungers, losers and nutters who have made upmuch of the Belarussian opposition in the past.

He faces formidable obstacles—and not just that the election campaignand count will be rigged against him. Another is the Belarusaitis ofhis own foreign supporters. What many westerners fail to realise isthat support for Mr Lukashenka and a close alliance with Russia, plussuspicion towards Poland, the West, and the opposition are not justthe product of the regime's propaganda, but also the sincere feelingsof a large chunk of the population. There is evidence to show thatthese feelings are eroding (for which three cheers) but they are stillstrong.

The Belarusaitis-driven enthusiasm of Mr Milinkevic's westernsupporters threatens his appeal to potential voters at home. Theregime is longing to present him as the representative of a Polishfifth-column that wants to bring Belarus under the cultural, politicaland economic domination of the west: ie joining not just the EU butNato, fighting in Iraq, sponsoring Chechen terrorism and being anAl-Qaida target (no it isn't logical, but that's never bothered them).Plus he supposedly wants to sell the country to foreign speculators.Which (caricatures aside) is pretty much what Belarus needs. Butsaying it loudly won't help the good guys win.

New blog!

This site is no longer active. Please go to edwardlucas.com/blog instead

Regards

Edward

Bene Merito award

Without my foreknowledge, I was last year awarded the Bene Merito medal of the Polish Foreign Ministry. Although enormously honoured by this, I have sadly decided that I cannot accept it as it might give rise to at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in my coverage of Poland.

About me

"The New Cold War", first published in February 2008, is now available in a revised and updated edition with a foreword by Norman Davies. It has been translated into more than 15 foreign languages.
I am married to Cristina Odone and have three children. Johnny (1993, Estonia) Hugo (1995, Vienna) and Isabel (2003, London)